In looking through some papers recently, I came across a three page handout from some course in the past, which I thought might be worth sharing. I can’t attribute it, as there is no identifier. I hope the original author won’t mind me sharing the ideas with a broader audience.
Activate prior knowledge
Activate prior knowledge
- Word association chain around the key word in the title or the heading or the image, perhaps with a time limit to provide extra challenge.
- Spot the genre or text type from the title, cover, image used.
- KWL; What do I already know about this? What do I want to know? Then after reading, what have I learned?
- How might the story continue? Sequence possible key events, words, phrases. What clues have led to this proposal?
- Multiple choice endings. Give alternative scenarios, discuss and choose.
- Use the text for cloze activities. What words could go into spaces? Discuss and choose.
- Learners given drawing tools and have to draw what they visualise while a story is being read to them. Share the images and reasoning how the images came to mind. Author intention?
- Design a storyboard for a passage, key event or as a prediction.
- Pictures of events, characters, with key associated descriptive language.
- Freeze frame tableaux of key events- photograph.
Summarising
- Devise a subheading for each paragraph, to show the key message.
- Highlight words in a passage for a specific purpose; eg adjectives/adverbs used.
- Reduce the text to five sentences, then five words, then one word.
- Sequence a list of points from most to least important.
- Restructure the passage into a different form, spider diagram, bullet points, flow diagram, decision tree, labelled picture, time line.
- Just a minute; learners have to talk on the subject for 1 minute. Rules as needed; repetition/hesitation/deviation… depends on age and ability.
- Write five top tips/golden rules for…
- True/false statements, based on a text. Select and justify decisions.
- Copy the text into the middle of an A3 sheet. Use the blank space to ask questions about the meaning, questions to the author etc
- Hot seat the “author or a character”; probably the teacher or TA, if brave enough.
- Give the answers, what are the questions?
- Text sequencing; reconstruct a text cut into chunks.
- Narrative map/flow diagram of events, or ideas in the text. Order and organise.
- Try to show changing levels of humour, tension, drama as a sort of “graph”/diagram.
- Log the structure onto a grid; eg cause/effect, argument/counter-argument.
Character analysis
- Tension/emotion “graph”; horizontal axis =time/narrative events, vertical axis = tension/emotion.
- Character on trial- summing up speech for/against or like/dislike a character.
- Magazine profile of a character.
- Dilemma; stop the story. List alternative courses of action, based on understanding to date. Review after reading next passage.
- Draw character; label with key descriptive words/phrases.
- Thought bubbles for specific characters at specific points in the story.
- Retell a scene from the point of view of an alternative observer.
- Character rank; most important to least important, powerful/least powerful, kindest/meanest.
- Relationship mapping in some diagrammatic form; arrow graphs, logic grid- characters along top and side of grid, then discuss relationships in interlocking boxes.
- Roles in a story. For specific characters, describe their relationships with others, friend, son, villain and how they affected the story.
- Interview the author for a TV/radio show; link to film and audio recording.
- Illustrate the main themes, with associated quotations.
- I’m going on a “quote hunt”.
- Select key quotes and how they impacted on the storyline.
- Top theme; discuss the most important theme and the reasoning for selection.
- Write a book blurb.
- Write a postcard/letter to the author. If they are still alive, send. If not the teacher becomes the author and responds in kind.
- Explore a moral or key message from the text.
- Learner personal vocabulary notebooks. Keeping words, phrases from texts.
- Word club; run like a book club, sharing and discussing new words.
- Highlighters; Key language features; adjectives in a persuasive leaflet, emotive language in a charity appeal, imperatives in a recipe.
- Rewrite a text into a different format; eg persuasive to informative.
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